Monday, February 26, 2007

lab 69 - menuhit

NAME

lab 69 - menuhit

NOTES

After removing Tk I still needed some menu functionality.
If you look carefully at the picture in my last post you'll see the little green menu!

I ported menuhit from plan9 and made it a module in inferno. I've used it in a few wm commands checked into svn. Because I'm Tk-less I don't have the tk toolbar so menuhit, like rio, is the way of controlling window operations, basic stuff like exiting from clock.

Why no Tk? I didn't do this because I hated Tk and the programming interface.
But I didn't like the way it looked. I use acme-sac the whole time so I essentially stoped using an Tk based commands. Also, I thought there's no way I'd ever give an end-user an application that used Tk. So I removed it just to see what would happen next.
The most immediate consequence is a lurch towards rio like interface.
But I don't think that's the end state. I'm also looking at the
browser as an end-user interface; that means charon.

A lingering idea is that document based interfaces are ideal for some applications.
They're easy to navigate; the look and feel of them really comes down to
a problem of typography. They are a classic interface.

By the way, if you've checked out the latest from svn, to launch charon in the acme-sac home directory from the windows command prompt, or shortcut,